As an individual contributor

As an individual contributor, most of your new ideas may have come from brainstorming with your team. In these cases, everyone is aware of an idea as soon as it comes up, and can give feedback immediately. In these situations, ideas are shared immediately and only the best ones make it through.

In theory, this is a great way to make sure ideas are shared early. In practice, brainstorming has a number of issues that I’ll get into in another post.

Aside from brainstorming sessions, you may have had an idea for a side project that you’re really passionate about and that you think will really benefit the business. Because it’s your idea, you’ll be emotionally invested in it and want to make a really strong case, before you pitch it to your manager. This is where the risk comes in. As an individual contributor, it’s important to develop a sense for what is a good idea to pitch and what isn’t. This comes from Active Commitment. One of the biggest difficulties for individual contributors is when a manager says no to an idea that really is good. It could be because there isn’t enough staff, there are more urgent priorities for the business, or a number of other reasons. The manager will have additional context that the individual contributor doesn’t, and so it’s always best to share the idea early, before time is spent on a project that could be rejected, postponed, or a duplicate of work that’s already done.

As an individual contributor, you’ll ideally internalize this lesson and make sure that all ideas are shared as soon as possible, so that everyone on the team is driving towards the same outcomes.

As a manager

So you’ve learned to share ideas early as an individual contributor, and you take that lesson with you into your new leadership position, only to find that things don’t work exactly like that anymore.

Sharing to other managers

I was recently working on a change management project for my department that required a conversation with the HR team. I talked it over with my boss, and we had outlined certain checkpoints in the process, with a later checkpoint to inform HR. I outlined a general plan in a document and sent a message to our HR person.

Hey, I’d like to run an idea by you. I’ve been talking with my boss about [change management process], and I’ve started working on a doc about it. It’s still pretty early in planning this, I just wanted to check if there were any immediate red flags, or things I should consider before we properly pitch it to you. When would be a good time to send the doc over for you to skim?

I had taken the lesson from my individual contributor days, into this management situation and shared an idea early to get feedback. The only problem is that, at the leadership level, everyone has a number of strategic priorities they’re working on at any given time. Sharing an idea too early in the process pulls their focus from their priorities, and costs time for them to get up to speed on what’s happening.

I could have avoided this situation, by waiting a little longer and scoping it out a little more. The doc I shared was a lot of rough notes about the problem we were trying to solve, some potential solutions, and rough milestones. Generally all the right pieces were there, but it was a few pages long and pretty disorganized. If I had spent the time to organize it into a simple 1 page briefing on the situation with better organization and clearer milestones, I could have saved everyone some time and confusion.

When you’re sharing ideas to other people at the leadership level, you aren’t looking for feedback immediately. If it’s an initiative that needs to happen, and already has approval from the executive level, your goal is to make it clear and easy to understand before you share it for feedback, not to share it as early as possible. The main difference is that this change is going to happen, it’s my job to implement it.

As an individual contributor, an idea needs to be shared early to avoid wasted work. As a manager, it needs to be shared with appropriate context to avoid wasted work.

Sharing to your team

Before sharing ideas with your team, you’ll need to go through a longer process. There’s a whole change management process that I’ll discuss in a later post. The short version is that the work will be in progress and have serious momentum before it’s shared with your team.

You’ll have your strategy 1 pager complete, shared it with other leaders so everyone understands what needs to happen, meet with leaders to align on the vision for the future, and have all your key stakeholders aligned before it goes to your team.

Sharing to your boss

Thankfully, some things are still simple. When you share an idea with your boss, you should still pitch it as early as possible. As you move up management levels, active commitment is still a skill you’ll be developing.

Wrapping Up

Individual contributors are taught to share ideas early, in case an idea won’t be carried forward. This prevents unnecessary, premature, or duplicate work. For managers sharing to other managers, an idea should only be shared once it’s clarified and easy to get up to speed. This avoids wasted time gathering all the context. For managers sharing to their team, even more details will be solidified and the ball should already be rolling by the time it’s pitched to the team. This allows the leadership team to be aligned on the message going to the team to ensure that everyone can get onboard with the idea faster. Finally, as a manager pitching to your boss, you should still share ideas early in order to continue building the muscle of active commitment.